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Brett Barakett, CEO and founder of Tremblant Capital Group, a New York–based hedge fund, must decide what to do with his fund's position in Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, which has dropped in value by more than 40% in recent months. Tremblant is a hedge fund that specializes in forecasting consumer behavioral change and capitalizes on the disconnect between stock prices and consumer behavior. In the case of Green Mountain Coffee, many other sophisticated investors have taken short positions in the stock, leading Barakett to question whether his fund had the right trade thesis.

United Airlines has pledged to improve its training programs and empower its employees to put customers first in the wake of a video showing a passenger being dragged from a plane. Of all the U.S. air carriers, United should have known the power of social media and public outrage. It had learned years earlier in a prominent case about how fast viral content spreads and the ability of consumers to talk back to corporations. But the moral of this story is not how to do crisis management faster and better in a lightning-fast digital world. It’s that even the nimblest and deftest crisis management response cannot contain the damage of going straight to “call security” and crossing the last line of defense in customer service design. And an audience of customers standing by with their smartphones to record any spectacle seems to have had, until now, unfortunately, no discernable impact on corporate policy guidelines for dealing with uncooperative customers. Companies building computer-assisted rules for customer management in predictably difficult situations need to understand that human judgment is still one of the most important tools. Company leaders need to offer better employee training on all these points.